TMCnet News

Using ICT to improve agriculture [EMBIN (Emerging Markets Business Information News]
[October 21, 2014]

Using ICT to improve agriculture [EMBIN (Emerging Markets Business Information News]


(EMBIN (Emerging Markets Business Information News) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The international community celebrated World Food Day on October 16, as designated by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). This week's article will feature one of several UWI St Augustine research initiatives impacting the agriculture sector. The AgriNeTT Project—An Agriculture Knowledge ePortal: Research on Intelligent Decision Support for Enhancing Crop and Livestock Enterprise Management, is led by Dr Margaret Bernard, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Technology, Faculty of Science and Technology. This project is funded by the UWI-Trinidad and Tobago Research and Development Impact Fund (RDI Fund).



In support of the national objective to develop an agricultural sector that is competitive, vibrant, technologically advanced and fully integrated with other critical sectors such as manufacturing, tourism, trade and the environment, The UWI St Augustine Campus has embarked on a project to enhance the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in agriculture. The AgriNeTT project focuses on empowering the agriculture sector through the use of ICT, especially by developing mobile applications (apps) that assist farmers and policy makers. AgriNeTT is a multidisciplinary collaborative effort of the Faculty of Science and Technology and the Faculty of Food and Agriculture at The University of the West Indies, together with farmers' representatives, including Terrance Haywood, president of the National Food Crops Farmers Association. The project's partnership with the Ministry of Food Production and the National Agricultural Marketing and Development Corporation (NAMDEVCO) was formalised in February 2014 with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). According to Dr Margaret Bernard, team leader of the AgriNeTT project, “The main aim of the project is to assist the agricultural sector with increasing T&T's food production through collaborative ICT research and development. The AgriNeTT team is currently building mobile apps and Web-based applications that can assist farmers and policy makers. From our initial studies, we recognised that the data required to inform policies are either unavailable or available in small pockets, mainly through surveys. We have therefore moved in the direction of Open Data and have developed an Open Data Repository, particularly to house agriculture data on a national level†. Open Data has facilitated unparalleled access to data by all segments of society around the world. The AgriNeTT Open Data Repository will house different data sets from institutions and associations, including farm level production data, commodity prices and volumes, farm land spatial data, soils, weather, and pest and diseases tracking data. A prime objective in building this platform is to create a central repository for agriculture data in which the data sets can be visualised in different ways and where local developers can build applications, including mobile apps, which are useful to the national community. Dr Patrick Hosein, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Technology, Faculty of Science and Technology and a member of the AgriNeTT team, has already built the Open Data platform using an Open Source system, called CKAN, (which is used by the USA and UK Open Data platforms). This is available at http://data.tt and http://maps.tt (for spatial data). The main data sets that are currently on the site are daily commodity price data obtained from NAMDEVCO. The project team has already hosted two well-attended national workshops on the Open Data concepts and is currently in discussions with several organisations, including the Caribbean Agricultural Research & Development Institute (CARDI), the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). However, institutions in all sectors can become providers of open data sets. Several applications are currently being developed with the research and development organised into three main areas: • Dr Margaret Bernard, Kyle DeFreitas and their team are developing applications in the areas of data mining to extract useful information from the Open Data Repository, particularly as it relates to commodity prices and production volumes. The team has recently completed one app for Android phones, called AgriExpenseTT, which is now available for download on Google Play. This app will assist farmers in recording crop expenses on the go and monitor cost of production per unit harvested. Some farmers do not keep very good records of expenses. This app makes record keeping easy and will help farmers make more informed decisions regarding the selling price of their produce. It will also be useful when applying for loans and/or subsidies.

• Dr Rene Jordan, Lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Technology, and her team are developing a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) application using spatial models to assist policy makers and farmers with production alternatives based on land use factors and environmental data. The GIS application seeks to explore how changing geographic environments can affect crop production. The team is developing a fine grain land suitability map based on the Soil Capability survey. This mapping tool takes into account geographic details such as rainfall, proximity to roadways, and susceptibility to flooding among others. This Web-based tool will be used primarily by agriculture policy makers but can also be useful for farmers trying to determine which crops are best suited for the lands available to them. At least 25 layers of spatial data have been uploaded to the open data host: http://maps.tt. The maps produced can help answer various spatial questions. For example, how is land use distributed across the country? Are there ideal locations for the cultivation of various crops? Dr Wayne Goodridge, Lecturer in the Department of Computing & Information Technology, and his team are working on Expert system tools for diagnosing plant pests and diseases. A mobile app, AgriDiagnoseTT, is being developed to assist farmers with education on plant diseases, diagnosis and treatment. Also being developed is a web-based, companion Pathologist application that will allow a plant pathologist to 'train' the system by entering information about plant diseases.


(c) 2014 EMBIN (Emerging Markets Business Information News) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]